And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this episode is titled, Aging!

And if you're ready, we'll start the show!

Hey there! It's December already! This time next month, Christmas will be done and dusted for another year, so if you're getting stressed

over everything, just remember that. Although it really doesn't seem very long since last Christmas,

does it? Well, it doesn't to me. Maybe that's a time distortion thing because I'm getting older,

but 2023 seems to have flown by. And what with it being my birthday next week as well, I do get a sense that I'm

running out of time, despite still having, hopefully, decades left of life in me. Maybe I'm only

halfway through, don't know. But however much time I've got, there's still so many more

stories to hear and tell.

Now, I'm 48 next week, but it doesn't seem 30 years ago when I was 18 and all I wanted to be was older.

And if I cast my mind back to December 1993, when Meatloaf was at number two, knocked off the top spot by Mr. Blobby. Never going to forgive Noel Edmonds for that. I became 18 years old. It was a Wednesday. I worked in a steel tube

warehouse back in those days in Coventry. And when I mentioned to one of the guys on the

shop floor that it was my birthday, he asked me how old I was. And when I told him I was 18 today,

he stopped what he was doing. And he looked at me and shook his head and said,

God, you've had hard life. And I thought, well, no, not really, not compared to some,

but he said he'd always thought of me as much older,

which I'd never really considered before, being not quite five foot five,

I'd always been a bit shorter than most people around me.

So my school age self, when I became who I am,

...